At film festivals, you usually have to make a choice between seeing about a quarter of the program and writing about everything you see, or seeing as much as you can and writing about very little of it. I usually opt for the former strategy, but at this year’s TIFF, I decided to switch it up. Tired of feeling like I miss all the good films at a given festival because I’m off seeing the important ones, I made it a point to spend my six days in Toronto seeing far more films than I could possibly write about within the temporal confines of the festival. As a result, I wrote about very little within the temporal confines of the festival. Whoops.

So, instead of rushing out a bunch of crap content just to do it, here’s a brief accounting of everything I did see, with links to things I did write about, and lazy letter grades for all! I’ll revisit a number of these films — including The Road, Hipsters, A Serious Man and Videocracy, when I have more time to do them justice.

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I should note that on my actual third day in Toronto, I saw two films that I’m not going to be able to write about on just one viewing: The Road and A Serious Man. If you follow my Twitter updates, you’ll know that I was blown away by the former and don’t know what to make of the latter. I know better than to try to waste words on first-blush reactions like that. I plan to catch up with both before their theatrical releases and will report back then.

So let’s skip straight to Sunday’s screenings. As mentioned previously, the “accidental” double feature is not an unusual phenomenon at TIFF, but I still didn’t wake up this morning expecting to see two one-note comedies about the odd symbiotic relationship between wealth accumulation, fabrication and faith. An even more surprising commonality between Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story and The Invention of Lying starring/co-written and directed by Ricky Gervais, is that both feel in a way like huge-scale home movies. They tackle grand concepts from an ironic remove, and yet still leave the impression that their most important statements are about their makers.

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The new trailer for Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story debuted yesterday on CNN.com, but obviously the world (including me) was too busy crapping on the Avatar trailer to notice. Even the Wolfman spot received more notice. For awhile last night I thought maybe people, even those on the left, were tired of Moore completely. But no, there has finally been some discussion of the thing today.

And the consensus appears to be that Moore isn’t making films any fresher or more groundbreaking than James Cameron is. In fact, Moore’s latest seems surprisingly dated. This is something we’ve expected, of course, given the ongoing story of the economic meltdown, but it is interesting to see so much Bush as well as a complete lack of footage that appears to have been shot since Obama was elected.

Worst of all, everyone agrees, is the use of M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on the soundtrack. Even if that song hadn’t been used to death by Pineapple Express and Slumdog Millionaire ads, I would think I was watching a trailer from 2008. How about, given the current events, Moore just rereleases Sicko instead?

Check out what the rest of the film blogs are saying about the film/trailer after the jump:

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I spent the weekend at the Traverse City Film Festival, the fifth annual event presided over by Michael Moore in the waterfront town where the filmmaker lives and works in Northern Michigan. Though he and his staff were editing Capitalism: A Love Story across the street from the festival’s main venue around the clock all week, Moore himself introduced nearly every event I attended, including one where he unveiled both a trailer for the almost finished latest film and the entirety of the rarely seen film that gave Moore his first experience in front of a film camera (more on that later). At most of these events, he’d take the stage and talk at length to an entirely adoring crowd, casually making reference to his new film, his reputation and past career, and his future plans. A scoop from the later category: Moore said he’s planning to star in a one-man show on Broadway, presumably along the lines of his 2002 shows at the Roundabout Theater in London, “sometime in the next 24 months.”  He promised to give the show a tryout first at the film festival  — “because if you kill ‘em in Traverse City, you’ll kill ‘em anywhere.”

Outside of Moore’s shadow, Traverse City’s vibe as a festival is along the lines of Telluride and True/False — small town, secret screenings, celebrity/legendary filmmaker guests who blend in with the locals and lesser known attendees while giving each installment of the invent a specific character — but with a dedicated emphasis on comedy. In addition to the panel which I already reported on, in the three days I was in town TCFF hosted an afternoon course on the art of comedy, a preview of the long-anticipated upcoming season of Curb Your Enthusiasm hosted by festival board member Jeff Garlin, and Moore and the festival co-founders handed special prizes to the Funniest Fiction Film and Best Comedy Documentary (to In The Loop and Winnebago Man, respectively), and gave the “Stanley Kubrick Award for Bold and Innovative Filmmaking” to Bob Byington, who was the first director to have two films in the festival — both of them no-frills comedies. I’m not complaining, but one does wonder how Moore’s just-announced comedy festival will actually differ from the film festival in practice.

The full list of TCFF 2009 winners is after the jump.

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Now that Brüno is finished and in theaters, what is Sacha Baron Cohen to do next? Surely he can continue appearing in movies not his own, such as he did with Talladega Nights and Sweeney Todd, but will there ever be another shock-mockumentary in the style of Borat and Brüno? Even if he develops some new characters, people don’t believe he could make another one of these kinds of films stealthily enough to make it work.

Well, let’s hope that isn’t true, because we would love to see at least one more. And we think he’s enough of a chameleon that his increasing fame won’t get in the way. As Metromix recently pointed out, there are just so many people (live and dead) who still need to be interviewed and/or pranked by Baron Cohen. Also, there are so many more marginalized people out there who could use a Brüno of their own to challenge the stereotypes and expose the continuing prejudices of our country.

To help Baron Cohen come up with a new character and issue, we’ve selected five already existing scenarios — which should help garner funding since Hollywood is so into remakes — to inspire him.
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